Platform Engineer
Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Salary: £71,043 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension
Do your best work, for the right reasons.
Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We’re a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.
Our culture has been independently recognised through:
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Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)
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Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact
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Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback
About the Role
We've built a lot, fast. Now we want to make it last.
As a young organisation, we've used modern technology to move quickly and get remarkable products into teachers' hands. We've proven what's possible. Now we're maturing, making sure the foundations are as strong as what's built on top of them. We see this role as central to that change.
You'll work with engineering, product, and research colleagues to build confidence in using observability principles that deepen our understanding of how teachers and pupils use our products, and help us keep improving them. We work in product squads alongside designers, researchers, and education experts, regularly releasing new features and improvements so teachers and pupils get quick and easy access to the highest quality learning resources.
Alongside other members of the platform engineering group, you'll enable squads to move more quickly by optimising tooling and implementing automations, including the effective and safe use of AI. You'll drive the creation and adoption of engineering standards across code, deployment, security, observability, and monitoring. And you'll be a key driver of automation, working with the rest of the platform team to improve the overall developer experience.
You'll need a good understanding of platform engineering in a SaaS-heavy environment and the value it brings to an organisation. A solid grounding in development practices, security fundamentals, and infrastructure operation matters. But specific technical skills are less important to us than a passion for automation, an ability to understand complex systems, and a pragmatic engineering approach.
As part of the Oak team, you'll contribute to the wider success and culture of the organisation, and support and role model our five values: create the right environment, be a great colleague, own your role but work for the team, make things happen, and keep getting better.
What you'll be doing:
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Leading continuous improvement of the observability, performance, and reliability of our web applications (Next.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node) and serverless functions (Google Cloud Functions, Cloudflare), deployed on Vercel and Cloudflare
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Helping teams maintain high service quality by promoting a culture of quality across engineering and product, and enabling squads to use SLOs and SLAs effectively
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Contributing to the strategy and evolution of our monitoring, logging, and reporting solutions so developers can resolve problems quickly and get meaningful insights into application behaviour
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Identifying and implementing automations that speed up development, improve security, or raise the quality of what we deliver
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Working in cross-functional, product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation
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Deputising for other members of the platform team and taking on broader responsibilities as needed
What we're looking for
You'll have strong professional experience working with event-driven architectures using serverless technologies such as Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, or Azure Serverless.
Beyond that, you'll bring:
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Demonstrable experience collaboratively designing and implementing observability, monitoring, and reporting solutions for complex cloud infrastructures in a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including solutions for squad-specific use cases
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Confidence reading and maintaining web application code, with the ability to design and build small apps, preferably in JavaScript or TypeScript
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Experience with cloud computing platforms and a working familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools
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A collaborative approach, comfortable promoting and leading collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and able to frame work in terms of impact.
You'll want to contribute in all areas, not just your own lane. You'll be comfortable working at pace across a range of digital systems, always looking for ways the team can keep getting better. And you'll be excellent at remote working, building relationships and managing your time effectively.
Specific technical skills matter less to us than a sound engineering mindset and the ability to bring others with you.
Our Benefits
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25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)
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Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year
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11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)
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A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off
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Fully remote working — we’ll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred
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Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun
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A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust
Inclusion and Belonging
We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors.
If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.
We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.
Key Info
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Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here
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Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time
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Closing date: We’ll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early
If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life’s best work, we’d love to hear from you.
Next steps
You'll answer a few admin questions followed by three questions about your day-to-day work. Answers are anonymised, randomised, and reviewed by a panel, so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.
If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview. We give everyone feedback at the end of the process.
Interview dates:
Interview 1: Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 July 2026
Final interview: Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 July 2026
If this sounds like somewhere you could do your life's best work, we'd love to hear from you.
We're getting strong responses to our roles and we may close applications early. If you're interested, don't leave it too long.
We are an equal opportunities employer.
We're an equal opportunities employer and committed to making sure everyone is treated fairly, regardless of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Using Anonymous Recruitment
This organisation is using Anonymous Recruitment to reduce bias in the first stages of the hiring process. Submit your application as normal and our system will anonymise it for you. Your personal information will be hidden until the recruiter contacts you.
About Chapter One
Chapter One is a growing charity, working to ensure that every child has 1:1 reading support at the time they need it most.
Our unique Online Reading Volunteer programme currently supports about 3,500 children a year. It pairs disadvantaged, struggling five to eight-year old (KS1) readers with reading support volunteers who come from over 180 local and national businesses. The volunteer task is very focused: readers commit 30 minutes a week to read with a child using a bespoke digital platform for an entire academic year. The results are transformative, boosting children's reading confidence and ability.
We have set ourselves ambitious targets and want to support 3,900 children by 2026/27, so this role, with responsibility for communicating and maintaining relationships with our existing corporate partners, will be crucial to ensuring that we have sufficient volunteers and support to achieve this target.
For more information about our programmes please visit our website. Please also take some time to visit our social media channels and watch our videos.
About the Role
Chapter One is seeking a proactive, organised and enthusiastic Corporate Partnerships Communications Officer, reporting to our Marketing & Communications Manager, to support the delivery of excellent communications and content for our growing portfolio of corporate partners. Working closely with the Corporate Partnerships and Marketing & Communications teams, you will coordinate partner communications activity, managing workflows, timelines, approvals and follow-up to ensure a smooth and positive partner experience.
You will build strong relationships with corporate partners across our partnership tiers, acting as a key point of contact where appropriate and helping to identify and develop engaging stories, case studies and content opportunities. You will create tailored communications for partners, including internal announcements, intranet content and employee-facing materials, ensuring messaging is aligned with partner needs and Chapter One’s mission.
This is a new role within Chapter One and is an opportunity for an early career professional to learn about charity partnership communications in a dynamic charity which is flexible and agile.
Key Responsibilities
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Act as the primary coordinator for corporate partnership communications and content, managing workflow, timelines, follow-up and sign-off.
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Build and maintain effective relationships with corporate partners across the Platinum, Gold, Silver and other partnership tiers, acting as their main point of contact where appropriate.
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Proactively identify, gather, and develop stories, case studies, and other content opportunities from across the corporate partnership base.
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Draft bespoke content for individual corporate partners on request — for example, internal announcements, intranet copy, or employee-facing campaign materials.
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Work closely with the Marketing & Communications and Corporate Partnerships teams to ensure content is aligned with the corporate partner journey and that sign-off processes run smoothly.
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Support the production of corporate partner impact reports, award entries, and a content and asset library relevant to corporate partners.
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Maintain accurate records of corporate partner activity, approvals, preferences and key communications.
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Contribute to improving processes, workflows and consistency across corporate partnership communications activity.
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Represent Chapter One professionally in all partner interactions.
General Responsibilities
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Attend online and in-person meetings and relevant team sessions to support collaboration, communication and delivery of Chapter One’s activities.
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Provide general administrative support to the Marketing & Communication and Corporate Partnerships teams as required.
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Manage multiple priorities and deadlines, ensuring content requests, approvals and partner communications are delivered in a timely and organised way.
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Support the maintenance and organisation of corporate partnership resources, including content libraries, assets and shared team materials.
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Represent Chapter One professionally at meetings, events and partner interactions, demonstrating commitment to the organisation’s mission and values.
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Undertake other duties as required to support the delivery of Chapter One’s objectives.
We are looking for applicants with the following essential qualities:
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Strong relationship-builder, confident working with a range of partners and stakeholders.
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Highly organised, with excellent attention to detail and a reliable approach to follow-up and record-keeping.
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A clear and adaptable communicator, able to write well for different audiences and channels.
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Proactive and self-starting, with an eye for stories, content opportunities and ways to improve how things work.
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Process-minded and comfortable managing multiple priorities and deadlines simultaneously.
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A collaborative team player, happy working across teams and with shared sign-off processes.
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Calm and flexible under pressure, able to exercise good judgement and handle sensitive information with discretion.
How to Apply
Please send your CV (maximum 2 A4 sides) and a covering letter via Charity Jobs. Your covering letter (maximum 1 side of A4) should:
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Detail your relevant experience, including clear examples.
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Tell us about a specific example of a piece of work you were responsible for - a relationship, a project, a piece of content - that wasn't going as planned. What did you do, and what would you do differently? We will expect you to talk about this at the interview.
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Tell us about how our organisational mission is in line with your values.
Applications that fail to meet these criteria will automatically be discounted. We understand that you may use AI to help craft your application, but do remember that we will be looking for individuals who write a covering letter that stands out. We want you to have every opportunity to shine and to show us your talents - please let us know if there is anything we can do to make sure the assessment process works for you.
Chapter One is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value and celebrate diversity in backgrounds and experience and are deliberate about the kind of inclusive teams we are building. Literacy is a universal concern, and we need people from all backgrounds to maximise our innovation, creativity and impact. We especially welcome applications from persons who have experienced disadvantage and/or from those who are of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities who are currently underrepresented in the organisation.
Chapter One is committed to safeguarding children and young people. All post holders are subject to a satisfactory enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service disclosure. Copies of our Safeguarding Policy and Safer Recruitment Policy are available on request.
N.B. Shortlisting is likely to take place from 29/06/2026. Stage 1 interviews are planned for 08/07/2026 and 09/07/2026 with successful applicants being invited to a second interview between 15/07/2026 - 16/07/2026. These dates have been scheduled based on the recruiting team’s availability, however we will make every effort to accommodate alternative requests where possible.
At Chapter One, we want to create a world where all children have the literacy skills needed to thrive.